site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

But there is a whole treaty there preventing such things, the ECHR. Which is from 1950's and that makes me think, if those sort of treaties existed at that time, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say, since we are further left now than in the 50s, that we are now full blown communists, or at least, the policymakers are.

I do not get this argument. The ECHR prevents you from directly deporting someone who makes a claim of asylum. Or summarily executing them for entering your country illegally. When the UK signed that treaty, they were very much not "full blown communists". How does the continued adherence to that treaty make them commie today?

Practically, the ECHR does not say you can not deport anyone ever. Even us Germans are deporting people ... to fucking Taliban Afghanistan no less.

--

Of course, mid-2026, being worried about immigration feels like being worried about palace intrigues in Constantinople in 1453. I am a software developer, so I am first in line for getting replaced by the machines, but I certainly will not be the last. All white collar work is up for grabs. Blue collar work might still be around for a decade (present rate, no singularity and all that), but even before demand might crash. Unlike the PMC, the data centers will not need a lot of people to fix their cars.

Against this background of "the economic value of the median citizen will be marginal to nil in the near future", sprinkled with x-risk and visions of God Emperor Altman to taste, "OMG whites will become a minority" does not sound like an urgent issue, to put it lightly. Frankly, I observe that the people who get elected on anti-immigration platforms are mostly buffoons and grifters and rarely wise statesmen. History might not judge Trump by the spectacles he holds on the lawn of the White House or in Iran, and more on how he dealt with AI.

(I realize that this is a fully general counterargument. "How can you care about $X when literally $Y is happening right now.")

You've posted a reply to a post that was removed. I didn't get to read it, does anyone have a summary of it, or at least a reason why it and a handful of comments below were removed by @Amadan?

I am not a fan of censorship/posts being removed especially without any context, but I'm assuming it was done because the post had some call to violence or something.

It was saved on the Wayback Machine:

Is there any hope for a proper right in the west? I don't think so, yet, and there is little time remaining.

Cthulhu only swims left because he has nowhere else to go -- Where will hope come from?

The mainstream right

I've been following UK politics developments of right wing parties and saw that Reform UK is leading the parliament polls though by a meager margin and also with only 24%. This party is led by the (In)famous Nigel Farage.

Now, as a right party, the primary concern of voters are immigration policies, what do they offer?

Illegal immigration is out of control because politicians choose not to enforce the law, and let foreign courts rob British citizens of a border.

A Reform government will stop the boats by immediately leaving the ECHR, restoring full control of our borders, intercepting and detaining all illegal arrivals, and deporting them.

Reform UK will implement a five-year emergency programme to identify, detain, and deport illegal migrants in the UK. We will leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act and pass the Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill to ensure that anyone who enters the country illegally will be ineligible for asylum.

Let us assume they're not lying in here, that's all fine... but this isn't exactly what one would consider necessarily a conservative policy. I can see how far left we've gone such that deporting illegals is seen as right wing. Deporting illegals should be a mainstream view. Border control likewise.

But there is a whole treaty there preventing such things, the ECHR. Which is from 1950's and that makes me think, if those sort of treaties existed at that time, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say, since we are further left now than in the 50s, that we are now full blown communists, or at least, the policymakers are.

The far-right

Well, regardless, reform isn't the only alternative for conservatives, there is a further right party, Restore Britain, which is seen as the "far right" party of Britain. Recently, their leader, Rupert Lowe, made a proposal/Ultimatum, offering support for reform IF they agreed to 5 basic principles of policy. You can watch the video to see him talk about it, but in another tweet, he wrote it down in short.

Our five conditions are principles the overwhelming majority of the Reform membership, and the wider country, believe in.

Mass deportations of illegals, and deporting millions of foreigners who are a drain on our society.

Securing our country’s demographic security, reversing the Islamification of Britain and implementing the recommendations of our Rape Gang Inquiry - this includes deporting foreign national accomplices of the rapists - my backing of that was the very reason Farage removed me to begin with.

Giving the British people a referendum on the death penalty.

Restoring a self-sufficient Britain through the difficult decisions that will require delivering a country that can feed, power and defend itself.

No failed Conservative ministers, who are responsible for the destruction of Britain, in any future cabinet. Not sack them, or remove them, just not hand them the same power they previously abused to demographically vandalise Britain.

These principles are essential to the restoration of the country we all love.

Now, this looks similar to what is proposed by reform, but goes deeper, addressing the demographic and islamic issue. This position is the "far right" position. And again, a centrist could easily accept these terms, well, if we go back in time, even some communists would be fine with these.

Now, will Farage accept? I don't know, but i don't think he will, because he has said in interviews that alienating islamic voters is not possible anymore, because they will become a huge portion of the voting base in the future: "If we alienate islam, we lose"

I am not against pragmatism, but i don't think that being pragmatic is accepting a slow death where each concession you make chops off a part of your body, until the point where you actually die and just join the status quo you're fighting against. It's quite baffling that "far right" is "mass deportation of illegals" or "opposing islam", i can make a very quick list of right wing thoughts on immigration from most extreme to most moderate

  1. Being openly racist/xenophobic and accepting no foreigners
  2. Being totally closed to immigration
  3. Allowing tourism only
  4. Allowing tourism and temporary residence/work visas
  5. Allowing permanent residency without citizenship/voting rights
  6. Allowing citizenship with a through background assimilation check aswell as having at least a certain number of years living in the country.
  7. Allowing citizenship for third generation migrants married to a native.

I didn't reach the actual part of deporting illegals yet... and so far, at points 6 and 7, we are in Switzerland

Ordinary naturalisation is the option for foreign citizens who have lived for at least 10 years in Switzerland, three of which must be in the five years before they file their application for citizenship, and who hold a permanent residence permit (C permit); Simplified naturalisation is the option primarily for persons who:

  • are married to a Swiss citizen;
  • were born in Switzerland and belong to the third generation of a family of foreign citizens living in Switzerland.

How far right is Switzerland? A lot apparently. Well, to drive the point home, when farage responded to Lowe today, he said that he wished to form a center-right alliance

The Reform UK chief said he would “do whatever I could for us to have a sane center-right alliance to beat Labour at the next general election”

So... even the proeminent right wing party does not consider itself right wing... because indeed they aren't. One could argue that they are playing around the overton window and in time the discourse goes further right, but there's little time for this. Britain's population will be minority white by 2060, and probably even earlier if we consider White and british, as they're already a minority in London. Soon the foreign descent citizens will be big enough to essentially block any sort of nationalist move.

Without enduring policies, things are not going to work out

With only a few decades to spare, the right still has to

  1. Crack down illegal arrivals
  2. Crack down illegal immigrants within the country
  3. Deal with poorly integrated migrants
  4. Adress the islam issue
  5. Adress the race and ancestry issue.

Which means, effectively, that the right does not exist. And it's very difficult to believe it will in any meaningful form, because it would need unprecedent political domination in order to sustain enough mandates to bring all of those things to light. Enduring policies are needed, coming in like Trump, deporting millions, but then losing the next election and have all the progress undone, is effectively worthless. Thus, i think it's quite Hopeless that, even with a near political victory, to be able to sustain long enough and put policies that will last through the center-left/left governments. There needs to be treaties, laws and a colaborative judiciary branch to prevent everything from being undone and be yet again, be a kind of conservatism that is just begging for progressivism to just "stop right here".

And, back to the ECHR, this thing is from the 1950's and is strong enough to cause conservative nightmares, how much political power it is required to, in a time where everything is orders of magnitude more liberal and progressive than the 50s, to create a "counter" ECHR? We might aswell just join the ones that still believe in a communist revolution.

Other "far-right" and conclusions

Afd in Germany is also leading polls, but it's very much similar to what Reform UK presents, tighten citizenship, asylum, modify the human rights agreements. I have a hard time believing parties within the EU can actually move torwards a Hungary-like immigration policy, which is in open defiance to EU legislation, but, given Germany's economic dominance in the EU, maybe the Afd could be the one party needed to tip the scales, though this is just a coping mechanism.

Giorgia Meloni in Italy has come a few steps on cracking down illegal immigration, but is still having net immigration on the hundreds of thousands via worker visas, adding to the doubts that it will ever be possible to do more than the bare minimum.

Now, Trump, i don't have a good understanding of how American politics work to comment much, but it seems that his policies are more of the same, executive orders to deport a lot of people, no real effort to bring down legal immigration. Things that can be very much undone in a future democratic government.

The biggest win in terms of institutions that the right has gotten in the west was... The overturn of roe v wade, which was merely something allowing the states to make their own laws. So, trade a full left-wing/liberal law forced upon all states to not forcing it, but not doing anything else to further push conservative policies forward, a softening of the chokehold, not a reversal. Meanwhile, birthright citizenship was maintained in the broad interpretation, again, showing that mass changes in legislation and institutions are needed, and Trump either has no power or doesn't want to press much.

All in all, it's hard to be hopeful anything will change until it's too late, if changing legislation is already hard enough, if not done in time, there's no legislating against demographics. In the end, the right isn't in the west yet, and it's probably too late already.

Cool, thank you for posting.